Yann Demange declined to discuss the Bond franchise, saying only he was ‘very flattered’ by the renewed speculation.
Photograph: Victoria Will/Invision/AP

Yann Demange, the London film-maker back in contention for the director’s role on the next James Bond film, is desperate to work in the UK again and says he hopes to capture authentic British banter on screen.

Days before the premiere of his latest film, the A-list crime drama White Boy Rick, Demange, 41, is back on an elite shortlist of talent under consideration. And in comments that will do nothing to quash the rumours, the director, who grew up in west London but has been working in Hollywood, said he was longing to get back to his roots.

Jack O’Connell stars in Demange’s first feature film, ’71, set in Belfast during the Troubles. Photograph: Studio Canal/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

“You don’t see enough of the real Britishness on screen, the banter,” he said. “I love the way we deal with things through humour. I am desperate to get back home and make something with some of that in it.”

His main concern, he said, was to work in London again. “I want to make London films of the kind we don’t yet see. Not necessarily gritty, but something that gets across the otherness and is perhaps filmed only half in English. Let’s be honest about the people who live in London.”

Demange, who is half French and half Algerian, is now filming a big budget HBO series, outside Chicago, while he awaits the premiere of his second feature film at the prestigious Toronto film festival this month.

Starring Oscar-winner Matthew McConaughey, Bruce Dern and Jennifer Jason Leigh, White Boy Rick tells the true story of Rick Wershe Jnr, a notorious teenage drugs dealer and police informant, and is set in the gangland world of Detroit. Wershe was from the city’s deteriorating east side, an area that saw a huge boom in criminality and crack addiction during the 1980s as car factory jobs disappeared.

“Detroit is a landscape, post ‘white flight’, that fascinated me,” said Demange. “After all, it was originally the poster child for the American dream of capitalist expansion.”

The director was in Los Angeles, developing an American version of a film he had planned to make about the Brixton riots of the 1980s, when he was approached about the project. “I was asked out and I didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I put aside the riot film after I read about Wershe’s incredible story. I was really interested in the relationship between the father and son,” he said.

McConaughey plays Richard Wershe Snr, a small-time gun dealer who justifies his life of crime as a patriotic response to the second amendment right to bear arms. “This dad wants to be a buddy rather than a father, and yet he is judgmental about selling drugs. He is a bit of a Del-Boy Trotter really, although over here they think of him as like Willy Loman, from Arthur Miller’s Death of A Salesman.”

“Casting a first-time actor was a risk, but I didn’t want a suburban boy who has just listened to a lot of rap. I wanted someone who has it in his DNA. Richie grew up in a similar world to Wershe and went to a largely black school. He has had to deal with a lot and he knows pain,” said Demange, who visited the real Wershe in prison several times.

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Wershe was jailed aged 17 in 1988 due to a subsequently repealed Michigan law that imposed an automatic life sentence on anyone caught with at least 650g of cocaine. “I am not sure I want to do a true story again,” said Demange, “because once you have met the people actually involved you feel you can’t do some of the things you might have dreamed of on screen.”

After early British television work that included Secret Diary of a Call Girl and the Charlie Brooker zombie drama Dead Set, Demange made the hit east London crime series Top Boy, written by Ronan Bennett, which went out on Channel 4 in 2011. A new series from Bennett, with Demange still involved as executive producer, is now being made for Netflix.

Speculation on the next Bond film was sparked when it emerged that Boyle had left the project due to “creative differences” and that the film’s scheduled release date had been put back. Other hotly-tipped directors for Daniel Craig’s final outing as Bond include the Canadian Denis Villeneuve director of Sicario and David Mackenzie, the Scottish director of Hell or High Water. Christopher Nolan, director of Inception and Dunkirk, has also indicated he might be interested in a future reboot of the action franchise.